Buried Beyond Glory

You have touched the underbelly of hells rancid corpse.
You held onto fleeting moments of insanity for the sheer joy of it.
You stepped through yourself to embrace your own decadence and decay.
You have known no greater sacrifice than if you laid your own seed
at the altar.
You have seen compassion in pain and felt nothing in return.
You walk where others were so many times before
and so shall be again.
You die within no morale code or wanting for even strength to care.
You know only one master whose wrath holds no mercy .
You have seen his sickle swing wide and true for all of you.
You fear his cold touch yet surviving almost as much.
You offer it all to those who know not,
yet praise u with easy candor.
They call you hero and more without a notion
of the absurdity of it all.
You are the warrior, the last to fall the first to die
for a politicians lie.

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Editor’s Note

The number one question our editors receive is—what do the editors and judges look for when judging the contest? The number one answer we give is creativity. Unlike prose, writing composed in everyday language, poetry is considered a creative art and requires a different type of effort and a certain level of depth. Of the thousands of poems entered in each contest, the ones that catch our judges’ eyes are the ones that remove us, even just slightly, from the scope of everyday life by using language that is interesting, specific, vivid, obscure, compelling, figurative, and so on. Oftentimes, poems are pulled aside for a second look based simply on certain words that intrigued the reader. So first and foremost, be sure your poetry is written using creative language. Take general ideas and make them personal. In his infamous book De/Compositions: 101 Good Poems Gone Wrong, W. D. Snodgrass imparts, “We cannot honestly discuss or represent our lives, any more than our poems, without using ideational language.”